Over the same weekend, Lucien ventured into his father’s home office in search of a phone book, so to retrieve the number of the sleep clinic Emily recommended. A forgotten landline telephone was uncovered on the cluttered desk, as well as the only working answering machine left in the house: Because Blythe relied on her cellphone to talk to family and friends, the console had fallen into abeyance. The message diode may have been blinking for months.
Lucien checked these messages. Several calls involved Ernie’s protracted dispute over a cable bill, while the remainder pertained to medical appointments. Eerily, one message originated from the very clinic the listener intended to call. Unbeknownst to the son, his father had scheduled a sleep study for apnea, but for which his untimely demise intercepted the date; the clinic had called to reschedule. The automated voice-over that preceded each message gave the day and time it was recorded, but no year. This call was no less than a year old, and likely never retrieved.
A dial tone was present in the handset; faint Hispanic music was also heard. This arguably spilled over from a pirate radio station somewhere in the Memphis area. The number for the clinic was dialed. It began to ring, yet did not end the strange radio broadcast.
A woman answered—not with a salutation but a question. “Are you interested in taking part of the sleep study?”
Lucien answered yes precisely at the moment a Spanish speaker started up with a boisterous advertisement. It was clear that the woman did not hear the soundtrack. “Let me give you a time,” she said.
Other voices joined the fray, as well as the thunderclap of horse hooves and a hail of ricocheting bullets: These were clichés of old movie westerns, which Ernie used to watch in his office. Native-Americans started chanting. (They appeared to be on the warpath.) Another voice (that of a cowboy) spoke about getting back to the ranch and warning the others.
After an appointment time was scheduled, the caller hung up the phone and looked under his father’s desk, checking to see if, among the neglected stereo equipment and jerry-rigged electronics, Ernie had left his VCR running. It seemed impossible that a movie would played endlessly for months since his death, but nothing of this nature was found.
No lettering was on the building, or emblazoned over the front desk in the lobby. The receptionist looked up from her laptop with calculated surprise, and the late arrival made a show of panting. She handed him a clipboard and pen and instructed him to write down his information on a release form.
The volunteer inquired, “Will I be mailed medication?”
“No,” she replied. “The procedure will be conducted here.”
Lucien had failed to note, from their previous telephone conversation, use of the term ‘procedure,’ which he regarded as strange. This was perhaps a medical trial for a new drug, although no other participants were in the vicinity. “Oh,” he sighed with disappointment. “I have to be back with my mother by the time Jeopardy comes on.”
“You will be out by three,” she reassured him, and gestured toward a corner where several folding chairs shared a wall with a water cooler. Tinkertoys overflowed a smallish table across from them, and suggested, in its mild disarray, a pediatrician’s waiting room.
The receptionist added, “You are free to peruse the reading material while you wait, but do not disturb the box.”
An insubstantial cardboard box sat precariously on the pile of magazines. Several holes were poked in its lid. If pastries occupied the carton, they would go stale quickly. The inclination of this box, in any case, might well send its contents spilling into the floor. Lucien was in the process of distancing himself from the impending calamity when someone in a white lab coat appeared in the doorway with a command.
“Follow me.”
The volunteer thought his guide someone more likely to scour vending machines for left-behind change than embark on a career in medical science. He cast about shiftily at dark doorways, but presently the two men passed down a half-flight of stairs and through a series of passageways. The escort stopped at another door and waved the participant through it. A formidable desk, covered with peeling wood veneer, occupied the middle of the windowless room. The fellow stepped around the rampart and parked in the chair provided. A small pillbox was removed from a squeaking drawer on misaligned rollers and placed in front of the test subject; a pencil and piece of paper were taken from a second drawer and laid beside the box.
Missing the point of the choreography, Lucien was preoccupied with a prominent grease stain on the researcher’s white, knee-length coat. When he next glanced at the man’s face, he was the one standing and the recruit was seated. A hand was raised over the items on the desk, as if trailing the path of a lumbering winged insect; this left the facilitator’s arm stiffly extended. Seeing the intrusion into his personal space, Lucien leaned away before fingertips clipped his nose; the back of his wood chair snapped loudly with pressure.
“As we speak, someone is at a nearby location,” began the dramatic instructions. “Your task is to swallow the tablet in this container, wait ten minutes by the clock on the wall, and draw what this person sees.”
“Isn’t this a drug trial for sleep medication?” Lucien complained.
The question apparently fell outside the parameters of the experiment, though an oracular answer was supplied. “It is said that, when you cannot sleep, it is because you appear in another’s dream.”
This reply was regarded as needlessly mysterious. “I am not an artist,” stressed the recruit. “I cannot draw.”
The tester would not entertain sour expressions, so launched away from the desk to exit the room. He paused in the doorway to adjust the dimmer switch on the overhead light, which significantly reduced visibility. The door was not pulled to behind him, and he did not walk far. Flabbergasted, Lucien pivoted in his swivel chair to peer into the hallway where the researcher assumed a sinister outline while whispering with an associate. This consultant also wore a lab coat, and the two disappeared down the corridor together.
The pillbox on the table was opened without delay and found empty. The test subject thought to pursue the tester with this information, but desired only to be finished with these unfortunate dealings. He shut his eyes in feigned attempt to concentrate on something to draw. Instead, his thoughts floundered in a subcutaneous domain: Fine print from the paperwork swarmed like gnats under his clenched lids: fine print he cavalierly did not read. The one detail recalled was his signature absolving others of liability.
One last attempt was made to visualize a picture, although Lucien could not anticipate the effect, or what effect he was to affect. The emerging bulbous creature under his scribble could have been any number of animals, and looked passably menacing.
The artist set down the drawing implement, unable to explain his feeble execution of his mother’s pet Shih Tzu. The room was too dark to draw well, but not to draw so badly as he did. Regardless, the unintelligible form worked to his advantage since Lucien had no conviction about what he created.
A frightful notion occurred to him: that of someone in peril. The idea that a woman was on the other end of the ‘telepathic’ transaction was arguably the motivation behind this feeling; and perhaps he thought of his mother because he sketched her dog.
A rotary telephone sat on the desk beside the pillbox, so he picked up the receiver with a mind to call and check on his mother. The faint crackle of Mexican music skittered in the earpiece like link sausages popping in a skillet.
“Hello…?” answered a hoarse voice.
“Hello,” was the caller’s bewildered response.
“Hello?” again asked the man.
“Hello?” was again the reply.
Lucien’s salutations were evidently not heard, for something like an irritated sigh passed over cowboy gunfire—although this time the stray bullet did not ricochet and ping off a high plains boulder. It simply fell into an abyss. The call was terminated from the other end, leaving follicles on Lucien’s neck to stiffen:
It was not merely the intonation and timbre of the voice, but an instinctual reaction in a son where a father’s un-verbalized frustration was well known to him. The listener did not believe the voice was live, but murmured from magnetic tape whirling inside an old answering machine.
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